Getting rid of unwanted features in MistyLook

MistyLook happens to be one of the most popular wp.com themes, but users occasionally complain about this or that default feature. Some of these features can be overriden via coding:

1. An image in a post or a static page will be highlighted by a dropshadow effect. You can get rid of the dropshadow by changing the image code (in the html editor) from this:

<img [etc.]

to this:

<img style="border:none;background:transparent;" [etc.]

(If the image code already includes style, just add those two commands within the style quotation marks.)

The same trick can be used to get rid of the border around images in Banana Smoothie, Bueno, Inuit Types, Solipsus, The Journalist v1.9 and Vostok – probably in other themes too. In some of these the border command alone is enough.

2. A link in a post or a static page will be olive green plus marked by a light brown dashed underline. You can get rid of this peculiar underline by changing the link code (in the html editor) from this:

<a href=[etc.]

to this:

<a style="border:none;" href=[etc.]

(Depending on the browser, you may get the same dashed line under clickable images too; same remedy. Same thing for clickable images in the Motion theme.)

For no underline and a different link color, write:

<a style="border:none;color:#HEX;" href=[etc.]

For a different link color plus a normal underline, write:

<a style="border-bottom:1px solid #HEX;color:#HEX;" href=[etc.]

Where I’ve written HEX, you write the hex number for the color you want – see “Colors” under Links 1 in my sidebar.

3. The header includes links to RSS feeds. You can hide them by putting this in a text widget (see here for explanation):

Widget content in MistyLook is displayed in a grey background, so if you paste the above code alone in a text widget, you’ll hide the RSS feeds alright but you’ll have an empty grey rectangle in the sidebar. Either paste the code in a text widget that includes other stuff too, or drag the text widget below all other widgets and add this code to mask the grey rectangle:

Related

Discussion

27 thoughts on “Getting rid of unwanted features in MistyLook”

You can see them in action (if that’s what you mean) by going to Appearance>Themes in your dashboard and clicking Preview. For some themes you can google for the theme’s or the designer’s webpage. There was a detailed scrutiny in an expert blog, but by now it’s severely outdated (only one third of the themes now available). And you can find info on various details or features if you click “Themes” in my right sidebar.

For wordpress self-hosted where do I remove the dashed line for linked images? Looked in the CSS file but can’t for the life of me find which part would remved the dashed border and underline on hover.

That worked out just fine. Made a little changes. Here is what i did:
style=”border-top:solid 1px #eee;border-left:solid 1px #eee;border-right:solid 2px #ddd;border-bottom:solid 2px #ddd;background:#fff;margin-right:2px;padding:3px;”

Yes, eee and ddd means a touch lighter – better than my version; and of course you can adjust the thickness of the border as you like. (The reason I called this simulation “crude” is it lacks the gradient.)

I’m actually facing another problem: Making my homepage a static page. This is simple for other themes but for this particular theme (Misty Look), the ‘Home’ page is not under ‘Pages’ on the left side bar under ‘My Dashboard’. So there’s no way to ‘hide’ it by putting it as a subpage.

I wish to put the ‘Home’ page as the front static page (changing the name ‘Home’ to something else) instead but can’t seem to do it even after watching and reading many help articles!

That’s something general, not particular to MistyLook: in almost all themes with a Home tab, that tab is a) built into the theme’s standard top menu, b) just a link to your blog front, not a static page such as those you create/edit under Pages. So, to get rid of the redundancy in the menu, it’s not Home that you turn into a child page, it’s your “Bio-sketch” page (as explained in this Support doc: http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/front-page/ ).

The problem with MistyLook in particular is that if you turn “Bio-sketch” into a child page, a link to it will automatically show up on the parent you will have assigned.

The good news is that MistyLook now supports the recently introduced “custom menu” feature, using which you can select whatever you like for your top menu:http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/

But my issue is that I can’t make the biosketch page a child page of the ‘home’ page as there is no ‘home’ page under the ‘Pages’ under My dashboard. I can only turn ‘biosketch’ into a child page of my other pages eg. ‘Projects’ but not ‘Home’ as its not even under ‘Pages’.

(Yes, your Home page isn’t under Pages because it isn’t a static page. And yes, you could only turn ‘Biosketch’ into a child page of your other pages e.g. ‘Projects’ – and it wouldn’t make sense to have a link to ‘Biosketch’ on ‘Projects’, that’s why I suggested the Custom Menu solution. But you’ve got it all figured out now.)

Author

Recent Posts

Subject Index

Subject Index

Search for:

Announcement 22/03/2012:
After WP's latest move, this blog will no longer offer active support and assistance. The blog will remain online but commenting on older posts has been disabled.
✶ All theme-related posts are updated up to and including theme 189 in this list, but will not continue to be updated.

Stats

3,258,409 views

Views per month:

Note: if you see ads on this site, they are placed by WordPress, not me.

Mostly on themes, formatting, coding, tweaks and workarounds.
Based on or springing from my contributing in the wp.com forum.